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Comment by new_here | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Firefox actually has a lot of good stuff and you can get its UI to match the Chrome experience quite easily. The Developer Tools are also quite good.

Biggest issue for me is not being able to import passwords from Chrome. I have to switch back to Chrome if I need to access some web services quickly, so building up saved passwords in a browser makes it more sticky. There's probably a reason for not being able to do this though.

It also starts to get a bit sluggish when you have a couple (6-7) heavy JS/DOM tabs open.

File download UI could be better. Skip the confirmation dialog, show file and progress at the bottom of the browser window.

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Firefox developer tools are awesome and they get better with every release! Lots of cool stuff recently added for debugging CSS related issues.

JS sluggishness might be because of a recent Firefox Pioneer study. I've experienced it for the past week and in the end I uninstalled Firefox Pioneeer completely because of it.

imho, file downloads are actually great. When you have active or recent downloads - you'll get a nice litle icon on the right from the URL bar. For active downloads it'll show the total progress for all downloads. Once clicked, it will open a small menu with your downloads. When you don't have any recent/active downloads it just gets out of our way. Much better than that ugly bar at the bottom of the window.

I didn't know about that download icon. I must have removed it when customising the UI. Thanks!

You can browse to https://passwords.google.com from Firefox if you want to look up one of your Chrome saved passwords (provided they're synced with your Google account of course). Not quite as convenient as a bulk import I admit but it's how I slowly migrated my passwords across as and when I needed them.

I had never known about this password site, thanks for sharing!

Consider using a third party password manager - helps in not being locked into any particular browser. I find LastPass to be quite good for my purposes

Firefox has an 'import passwords from chrome' button on Windows but on other platforms you can do it with https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass

Surely that's a problem with Chrome though? How do we know that's not their intention?

Agreed, I'm sure if Mozilla could do it they would.

They could just look at the Chromium source code to see how the passwords are encrypted. Perhaps it's just not high on the priority list.

Are you on macOS or Linux? Passwords can be imported from Chrome/IE/Edge on Windows.

macOS

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